by: Melanie Broder Bashaw

Our Marketing team brings up the Q3 videos constantly, like washed-up high school quarterbacks reliving their glory days. Remember those? They crushed. And the concept was so simple.

If you stick around content marketing long enough, you’re going to be asked to make a video. Probably several. You may even be asked to appear on-camera, to set up a home studio with a microphone and a nice plant in the background. This may make you panic. It made me panic.

But adaptability is one of the most important survival skills in this industry, and you don’t have to suddenly become a capital-C Creator to make videos that matter. Start small. Like we did.

Starting small with zero budget

A little background: I’m a content marketer at Backlight, a media technology company. We’re a small team — in Q3 2025, that meant two growth marketers, two product marketers, one content marketer (me), one designer, and one web developer. Our product roadmap revolves around two major media tradeshows each year, in April and September.

For the September show, we were building a campaign around a major feature launch: Iconik Review, a real-time media review and approval tool for production teams. It incorporated technology from another Backlight product, Cinesync — whose team had won a technical achievement Academy Award. The new Review was set to compete directly with one of the biggest players in the space. We were excited.

We were also stretched thin. Limited headcount, limited budget, and our VP was out on much-deserved leave in the lead-up to the show. As the sole content marketer, I needed to come up with something “fun” to organically engage people on social. So I figured: why not make videos?

A few small problems:  I had made exactly three Instagram Reels in my life. We were a remote company. And also… I wasn’t going to the tradeshow.

Letting the experts speak for themselves

We decided to leave it to the experts. We came up with a few simple questions and asked three Iconik product leaders to speak directly to the camera about them. Some videos were filmed on-site at the conference by our growth marketer Taylor; others were self-recorded at home. No marketing faces in the final edits. The sound and lighting weren’t professional. The editing wasn’t either. Branding was minimal at best.

We posted six videos across our company LinkedIn pages and expected the usual: a few likes and reposts from teammates and friends of the brand. Instead, we got more engagement than we’d ever seen.

The results look modest on paper — but collectively, September became our best month on LinkedIn ever, surpassing our other major tradeshow earlier that year. Across both the Backlight and Iconik pages, the video series drove roughly 28,000 total impressions, with an average engagement rate of around 8% and a ~4-5% CTR per post. The videos were the top performers on both pages for the period.

Why our scrappy video strategy worked

What worked, and why? I think it came down to a few things.

We let the product people talk. We didn’t script them heavily or dress them up. They spoke about what they know, and that came through. Their authenticity landed because it was real.

We didn’t wait for perfect conditions. The lighting wasn’t great. One video was clearly self-recorded from a home office. We posted anyway. And the audience didn’t care — or if they did, it didn’t stop them from engaging.

We treated it as an experiment, not a production. There was no pressure for this to be a polished brand moment. It was: let’s try a thing and see what happens. That low-stakes framing made it easy to start.

The first video is the hardest

We didn’t immediately overhaul our entire strategy after this. But we did decide to invest further in video. We made a proper sizzle reel for our next product launch. We filmed employees answering trivia questions at our Sales Kickoff. We made video case studies. Next quarter, we’re trying a video hackathon.

None of that happens without the scrappy stuff first.

So if you’re a content marketer with a writing background and no video experience, take this as encouragement: it’s never been easier to dash off a video. And those imperfect, budget-zero, nobody-will-watch-this videos? They can make an impact. And that impact will erase most of the fear.

The first one is the hardest. After that, it just gets easier. ■

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Melanie Broder Bashaw is a writer and content marketer leading content at Backlight. She came to marketing through literary fiction and criticism, which is her excuse for caring too much about how things are written. She is based in Los Angeles. Find her on LinkedIn.